TV Wednesday: CSI loses founding cast member in season finale

Paul Guilfoyle has played Capt. Jim Brass on CSI since the beginning

One of the founding cast members of one of TV’s longest-running crime dramas is about to call it quits. Paul Guilfoyle, who has played Capt. Jim Brass on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation since the show’s inception in 2000 walks out the door for good in Wednesday’s season finale, portentously titled Dead in His Tracks.

Guilfoyle, a veteran character actor in the movies before CSI, outlasted Marg Helgenberger, who went 12 seasons before leaving the show in 2012, and original cast member William Petersen, who left after a mere nine seasons.

Murder and mayhem haven’t taken their toll on viewers, though. CSI remains one of TV’s most-watched dramas, especially here in Canada, where it remains a Top 10 show with an average weekly audience of more than two million viewers for new episodes.

Paul Guilfoyle in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

CSI fares better than most TV dramas in repeats, too. More than a million viewers across Canada tuned in to see a repeat last month.

Brass was originally a background character, working on the periphery of CSI’s often grisly crime cases as the lead characters solved mysteries.

Over time, CSI viewers learned more about Brass. For example, he has a grown daughter who struggles with drug abuse and has fallen into Las Vegas’ seedy side, off the Strip and away from the bright lights of the hotel casino scene.

Paul Guilfoyle, right, in CSI

The past comes back to haunt him in the season finale. His daughter attempts suicide, and Brass has to make a career and life-changing decision.

CSI remains one of TV’s most enduring, if not always endearing, dramas. It’s no award winner, but it has survived and even thrived where many have failed.

CSI airs Wednesday on CTV/CBS

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National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
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That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile